Indian dev wins at UN challenge for open source tool

An Indian developer has won a global contest by United Nations by developing a unique open source tool. Called Global Policy, the tool was designed to deliver an interactive view of UN General Assembly resolutions and gain a deeper understanding of the voting patterns and decisions made by UN member states.

Abdulqadir Rashik, the engineer-turned-entrepreneur, has won the ‘Unite Ideas UNGAViz Textual Analysis and Visualisation Challenge’, which is the sixth challenge organised by big data crowd-sourcing platform United Ideas — developed by the Office of Information and Commuincations Technology at the UN.

First project to initiate state collaboration

The Office of Information and Communications Technology has decided to publish the prototype of Global Policy and share with various UN bodies and member countries. This will be the first project to initiate collaboration between Office of Information and Communications Technology and the US Department of State.

“Since its establishment in 1946, the United Nations General Assembly has drafted and passed thousands of resolutions affecting people in every corner of the world,” said Andrew Hyde, a Department of State official, detailing the Global Policy project. “In support of transparency and accountability, we believe that everybody, from the general public to policymakers to diplomats should have easy and timely access to this vast body of knowledge.”

Rashik has been active contributor to challenges organised by Unite Ideas. However, his Global Policy has surfaced as a major contribution for the UN and would bring transparency and accountability.

“Once again, our global network of talented open source developers responded with insightful, elegant and practical solutions that can be easily implemented and made available to United Nations offices and Member States,” said Salem Avan, chief of the global services division at the UN.

Many developers around the world had participated in UNGAViz. The whole idea behind organising the challenge is to create an open source tool capable of offering visibility and understanding into Member State voting patterns. The proposals for the challenge were judged based on technical scalability and potential of presenter.